Towards a Jazz Pedagogy: Lessons from Legends and Educators!
Tuesday 29th July 2025, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM (London Time)
This two-hour virtual workshop explores the foundational tenets of jazz pedagogy as both a conceptual and practical framework for teaching. Drawing from my research in “Towards a Jazz Pedagogy: Learning with and from Jazz Greats and Great Educators,” we’ll investigate how jazz (its historical and cultural legacy, structure, improvisation, and relationality) can be mobilized to inform dynamic, liberatory educational practice.
Through an interdisciplinary lens that bridges Black studies, music, and critical pedagogy, this session examines what educators might learn from the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Betty Carter, as both musicians and expert teachers. Participants will engage with activities that illuminate how jazz insists on listening, freedom, and collaboration, qualities often overlooked in contemporary educational spaces.
The session will offer a blend of lecture, short media clips, and reflective prompts to help attendees consider how jazz can reshape our pedagogical methods, classroom culture, and relationships with learners. We will explore key questions like: How can improvisation serve as a model for culturally responsive teaching? What does it mean to practice improv within a curriculum? And what can the jam session teach us about assessment?
This workshop is ideal for educators, voice practitioners, and creative facilitators who are interested in centering Black cultural knowledge, honoring artistic practices as intellectual traditions, and expanding the possibilities of teaching and learning.
🏷️ Price £30 (UK VAT inclusive)
🎥 Recording automatically sent to all who book (even if you cannot attend live)
▶️ Rewatch as many times as you like
📜 Certificate of attendance available
Dr Autumn Griffin
Dr. Autumn A. Griffin is an Assistant Professor of Urban Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a 2025 Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of Black girlhood studies, critical media literacies, and liberatory pedagogies, with particular attention to how Black cultural traditions offer new visions for education.
Attend this course for as little as £22 as part of the Voice Professional Training CPD Award Scheme.
Learn MoreSorry, this is an archived short course...
We have plenty of upcoming short courses coming soon. See details of some of them below or look at the full list of short courses.
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Tuesday 20th October 2026
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
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This course is designed to break down the fundamentals of acoustics for both spoken and sung voice in a beginner-friendly, accessible way — so you can easily understand and apply these concepts to your teaching or research.
Tuesday 20th October 2026
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
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Melanie Tapson
Through live demonstrations, group practice, and peer coaching, you’ll learn how to teach SOVTs and VFEs with clarity and precision, integrate their principles to support vocal health, recovery, and stylistic flexibility and troubleshoot challenges and adapt exercises for individualized results.
Tuesday 27th October 2026
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
(London Time)
Pop Pedagogy - an Overview
Kim Chandler
Some successful pop stars are celebrating career lengths of over sixty years, having been around since the 1950s when pop music emerged and diversified from jazz, so pop singing has been in existence sufficiently long now that, for teaching purposes, we can observe and analyse what type of approach serves it best.